Origins

Bosnian Muslims are a South Slavic people who, while similar in language to the Roman Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs among whom they live, differ from both of them primarily because of their Islamic faith. Along with the Croats and Serbs, the Bosnian Muslims, who number about two million (1981), are one of the three major groups in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a largely mountainous land (51,129 square kilometres) situated in the centre of what for the most of the twentieth century was the country of Yugoslavia. Until Bosnia-Herzegovina became an independent country in 1992, most Bosnian Muslims in Canada identified themselves as Yugoslavs, while some considered themselves Croats. Today, they generally prefer to be called simply Bosnians (Bošnjaks).

Bosnia and Herzegovina are actually two separate lands which during the medieval period functioned as distinct political entities that were either independent or subordinated to the Kingdom of Hungary-Croatia or to Serbia. During the second half of the fourteenth century, a local leader united both lands, which he ruled as King Tvrtko I. Later, during the mid-fifteenth century, Herzegovina functioned briefly as an independent state. Even before the period of political independence, Bosnia had become known throughout the Christian world as the homeland of the dualist Bogomil “heresy.” The Bogomils dominated Bosnian society during the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries and evolved into an independent Bosnian Christian Church which came to symbolize the region’s struggle to remain independent of outside control.

Like most South Slavic lands, Bosnia and Herzegovina fell to the Ottoman Empire in the course of the fifteenth century. Many Bosnian leaders had allied with the Ottomans before their conquest, while large numbers of Christians fled to neighbouring Croatia. Within the first century of Ottoman rule, most Bosnians who had not fled adapted to the new order by converting to Islam. These converts, some of whom came to hold leading positions in the local Ottoman administration and economic life, were the ancestors of a people that subsequently came to be known as Bosnian Muslims.

Alongside the Bosnian Muslims were Roman Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and nomadic Vlachs as well as Sephardic Jews who found refuge in this multicultural land. The Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs who resisted conversion to the religion of the Ottoman state came to view their fellow South Slavs who accepted Islam with scorn, accusing them of having “sold out” to foreign domination.

Throughout the entire period of Ottoman rule, which was to last from the late fifteenth to late nineteenth centuries, Bosnia and at times Herzegovina each functioned as a distinct administrative district (sanjak or eyalet) known in Turkish as Bosna and Hersek. When the Ottoman Empire began to lose control of the Balkans, Bosnia-Herzegovina was acquired as a single entity, first as a mandate (1878) and then as an annexed province (1908), by Habsburg Austria-Hungary. The local Serbs, in particular, opposed the annexation and soon were participating in an anti-Austrian campaign that culminated in the assassination of the Habsburg heir to the throne during a visit to Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, in June 1914. This was the well-known event that led to the outbreak of World War I.

When the war ended and Austria-Hungary collapsed, Bosnia-Herzegovina was in late 1918 annexed to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, subsequently known as Yugoslavia. In this new, south-Slavic, “Christian” kingdom, the Bosnian Muslims were associated with the culture and/or religion of defeated foreign empires and therefore were subjected to various forms of discrimination by the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav state. In response, many Bosnian intellectuals identified themselves as Croats of Muslim religion. It is thus not surprising that during World War II, when Yugoslavia ceased to exist, the Bosnian Muslims sided with the independent state of Croatia, which fought against those Serbian forces (Chetniks) that hoped to re-create the kingdom of Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia was restored in 1945, although not as a kingdom but rather as a Communist-led federal republic under the leadership of the wartime partisan leader, Marshal Tito. Within the new political system, Bosnia-Herzegovina became one of the six constituent republics of Yugoslavia, and the Bosnian Muslims were for the first time recognized as a nationality distinct from both Croats and Serbs. Generally pleased with their new status, many Bosnian Muslims identified themselves as Yugoslavs, although by the 1980s a specific Bosnian Muslim identity was on the rise as the result of a national revival led by the political dissident Alia Izetbegovi– . Since most Bosnian Muslims were secular in orientation with only a nominal relationship to the Muslim religion, the Bosnian revival had more to do with a national than a religious identity.

In 1990 free elections were held in Yugoslavia, and Izetbegović‘s newly-founded party of Democratic Action won a majority in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Under his direction, Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence in early 1992. The local Serbs did not recognize the new republic, however, and by 1993 the country was plunged into a brutal civil war between its Bosnian Muslim, Serb, and Croat inhabitants. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes as cities and towns were attacked by forces representing each of the country’s three nationalities. Many Bosnian Muslims sought asylum in several European countries and abroad, including Canada. Since the intervention of an American-led international military force in 1995, the situation is somewhat stabilized, although Bosnia-Herzegovina has effectively become divided into three zones governed by either Bosnian Muslims, Serbs, or Croats.